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Teddy Roosevelt Failed to Save the GOP From Its Crazies in 1912

It’s a mistaken assumption. The center of gravity in a two-party system rests somewhere near the middle—not in every election but always in the long run. Abandon the middle, and the other party will seize it. That was the GOP’s mistake in 1912. It chose the faction on the flank over the one nudging the center. When conditions changed, as was inevitable, the GOP had no maneuvering room. It’s political science 101.

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The Republican Party again faces a factional choice. A showdown is looming between its Tea Party-driven right wing and its less sharply defined center-right faction. If the reactionary wing prevails and fails to accommodate the party’s moderates—which appears likely—the Republican Party will cement its place as the 21st century’s permanent minority party.

Tea Party advocates would deny this, of course. One reason is that they live in an echo chamber, surrounded by people who think as they do. All politicians face this problem, but what compounds it in their case is the fantasy that, somehow, huge numbers of Americans will rally to their side once the logic of their reactionary platform is made clear. American history has few supportive examples but many contrary ones, including the thrashing that Barry Goldwater—“extremism in defense of liberty is no vice”—took in 1964. The historian Daniel Boorstin explained why: Most Americans are temperamentally adverse to zealotry.

Democrats are rooting for the GOP’s right wing to win out. What would be good for the Democratic Party, however, is not what would be good for the country. America’s political system works best when the two parties are competitive. It gets wobbly when the stronger party is unchecked. The Watergate scandal, for example, handed the Democratic Party a large congressional majority that, believing the advantages of incumbency would keep them in power indefinitely, went on an undisciplined spending spree. Three decades later, Democrats are still dealing with some of the fallout.

The Republican and Democratic parties are nearly the oldest in existence, a tribute to their capacity to seek the center when threatened. “Creatures of compromise,” is how the historian Clinton Rossiter described them. Large chunks of the Republican Party have been acting as if the historical tendency of our two-party system is a relic of the past. They have been pushing their party ever further to the right. The level of ideological purity of today’s GOP is nearly unprecedented. Gallup polls indicate that, whereas those who identify themselves as Democrats are rather evenly mixed between self-identified liberals and moderates, seven out of 10 Republicans are self-identified conservatives.

It is these conservative identifiers who will decide the eventual outcome of the intra-party fight that surfaced this week in Washington. If they heed the urgings of their party’s right-wing groups and donors—who have a lot of organizational and financial muscle—the GOP could have an unabashed right-winger as its 2016 presidential nominee. At that point, the party’s more moderate followers might ask themselves whether the party still has a place for them.

Although Theodore Roosevelt didn’t live to see the demise of his party, he predicted it, saying it was “madness” for the GOP to think it could stay in power on an ideologically extreme platform. Madness is apparently still in fashion in some Republican circles. The triumph of the party’s right wing would assure the party’s marginalization, throwing our two-party system out of balance for years to come.

Thomas Patterson (@tompharvard) is the Bradlee professor of government and the press at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. His latest book, Informing the News, was published this fall.